Julián Orbón was a composer with his feet in four worlds.
In 1925, one hundred years ago today, he was born in Avilés, Spain. As a child, he studied music with his father, composer Benjamin Orbón. At 10, he entered the Oviedo Conservatory to begin his formal training.
When he was 13, the family moved to Cuba. There Orbon studied with José Ardévol, with whom he assembled a group of aspiring young composers, Grupo de Renovación, whose mission it was to promote new Cuban music. He was still in his teens when he stepped up to take over the direction of the then only recently-established Orbón Conservatory, following his father’s death.
Not long after, he won a scholarship to study composition with Aaron Copland at Tanglewood. Afterward, he returned to his position at the conservatory until the Cuban Revolution began in 1953. In 1960, he left Cuba permanently, to teach at Mexico City’s National Conservatory of Music alongside Carlos Chávez.
In 1963, he moved to the United States, where he taught at Lenox College, Washington University in St. Louis, Barnard College, and the Hispanic Institute of Columbia University.
For the rest of his life, he made New York his home. He died in Miami while undergoing cancer treatment in 1991.
Orbón’s experiences in four countries allowed him to assimilate many influences in his music: Spanish, Cuban (and by extension Afro-Cuban), American, Gregorian chant, neoclassicism, and a kind of melancholy romanticism shaped by the collapse of his world during the Cuban Revolution. He was friendly with Copland, Chávez, and Heitor Villa-Lobos, all of whose music he clearly admired.
His own music is attractive, personal, and accessible. It’s a mystery why it isn’t heard more often. Like many composers of his generation, he seems to have fallen through the cracks between the classics and the new. A pity, because one could do worse than to program any of the pieces below.
¡Feliz centésimo, Julian Orbon!
Danzas sinfónicas (1955)
Tres versiones sinfónicas (1953)
Concerto Grosso for String Quartet and Orchestra (1958)
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